How to De-Stress Your Support Agents by Improving Collaboration With the Product Team

Customer support agents are always looking to find the right information. But the lack of proper tools/resources and the lack of collaboration with other teams stands in their way to attaining that.

Since most organizations use multiple tools to collaborate and exchange information within departments, signing in to each knowledge source to extract essential information becomes an arduous task for support agents.

In addition to that, the support team largely relies on the product team for fast and smooth resolution of customer cases. And this demands close collaboration between both the teams. Disconnected sources and teams only lead to decreased productivity, stressed-out support agents, and dissatisfied customers.

Here are 4 proven methods to help you de-stress your support agents:

1. Integrate support & product management tools

Most of the product and technical information lies with the product/engineering team. The support team requires this information to close cases at times. Also, in cases, where the support team needs assistance from the engineering team, the former escalates the cases and the latter manages all the escalations.

Still, both the teams sit in different areas and use different tools, separating them in the physical and virtual space.

Integrate your support system with your project management tool to make it easy to manage all the activities. With this, support agents can focus on resolving cases from the tool they use instead of logging into different subsystems. Effective integration will improve the response time taken by both the teams on handling customer cases.

2. Integrate knowledge sources with the support center

Organizations use tools like Slack, Clarizen, etc. to collaborate and manage tasks internally. This is where most of the information lies, and also results in information silos. On the other hand, customer cases are logged in support tools like Salesforce Service Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud, etc. Now in order to find the right answer, all the knowledge sources should be integrated with the support system so that the information is accessible to everyone.

3. Enable single sign-on

Needless to say, logging in to multiple systems to find information increases the case resolution time. Enable single sign-on! This will drastically reduce the time spent by a support agent and will make it easy for them to track customer queries effectively and efficiently.

Single sign-on helps support agents resolve customer queries in time, which will lead to increased productivity and customer satisfaction rate.

4. Implement a next-gen search solution

Implementing a search solution will help the support teams fetch all the information and access the knowledge sources in one place. Thus, helping them search for relevant information quickly and close cases faster.